Confronting Our Autocrat-In-Waiting: Part I
Larry Diamond analyzes Trump’s coming assault on American institutions—and proposes a gameplan for fighting back.
This article is part of an ongoing project by American Purpose on “The ‘Deep State’ and Its Discontents.” The series aims to analyze the modern administrative state and critique the political right’s radical attempts to dismantle it. Click here to subscribe to Francis Fukuyama’s blog and American Purpose at Persuasion to receive future installments into your inbox!
The second presidency of Donald Trump will present a historically unique challenge to American democracy. To be sure, the American constitutional system has always been a work in progress, and its arc has not always bent toward justice. For nearly a century from the end of Reconstruction to the passage of civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s, racial segregation, exclusion, and disenfranchisement severely scarred and limited American democracy. During the two World Wars, presidents assumed emergency powers, and an entire nationality group was interned during World War II in one of the most disgraceful assaults on freedom and equality since the end of slavery. The Palmer Raid, which targeted alleged leftists among immigrants after World War I, brazenly violated civil liberties. During the Second Red Scare after World War II, Joe McCarthy led an anti-communist witch-hunt that fanned hysterical suspicion and ruined many innocent lives.
But no previous American president has attempted to eviscerate constitutional checks and balances to the degree that Trump has repeatedly signaled he will do, with the intent of implanting authoritarian rule not for a day, but for a generation.
As a leader in business and more recently government, Trump has always demanded absolute loyalty. But during his first term, he lacked the team, the knowledge, and the plan to achieve it. His efforts seriously endangered American democracy—and the health and wellbeing of the American people during the Covid pandemic—but they were chaotic, poorly planned, and frequently slowed or thwarted by his own more sober and conscientious appointees. This time around, those more responsible stewards are gone. Surrounding Trump in the White House and the Executive Branch will be loyalists and extremists who are preparing what the Wall Street Journal columnist William Galston described to me as a strategy of “shock and awe” from Day One—an immediate assault on democratic norms and checks and balances.
During the 2024 campaign, numerous former staffers of the first Trump Administration sounded the alarm bell on the danger he posed to democracy. His former White House Chief of Staff, General John Kelly, warned in an October interview that Trump “certainly prefers the dictator approach to government” and “never accepted” that he couldn’t “do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted.” Kelly added starkly:
Looking at the definition of fascism, it’s a far right, authoritarian, ultra nationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized hypocrisy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy. So certainly, in my experience, those are the types of things that he thinks will work better in terms of running America. He’s certainly an authoritarian. Admires people who are dictators. … He certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.
Kelly also revealed that Trump repeatedly commented that “Hitler did some good things, too,” and Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic, reported that during his presidency Trump stated, “I need the kind of generals Hitler had.” The day after Kelly’s interview was published, 13 former Trump aides, all lifelong Republicans, released an open letter urging “everyone” to “heed General Kelly’s warning.” They wrote: “Donald Trump’s disdain for the American military and admiration for dictators like Hitler is rooted in his desire for absolute, unchecked power.”
In winning the presidency, while his party won both houses of Congress, Trump has earned the right to take domestic and foreign policy in sharply new directions. But whether those legitimate (if often ill-conceived) policy initiatives will be accompanied by an authoritarian aggrandizement of presidential power and an assault on civil liberties and the rule of law will depend on the integrity and independence of the judiciary, the professional military and civil service, and members of Congress, particularly Republicans. Their actions and decisions will in turn be affected by what people in business, civil society, and the media do either to capitulate to Trump’s abuses or insist on adherence to democratic norms and rules. These leaders in and out of government will determine whether Trump’s aspiration to become an authoritarian ruler—not on Day One, but from Day One—are contained, or whether the U.S. goes the way of Hungary, Turkey, and other countries that elected populist demagogues and saw them hollow out democracy.
Trump’s Authoritarian Plan
Barely a week after his election victory, some key elements of Trump’s plan were already becoming clear. In a move that no major analyst anticipated, Trump announced his desire to bypass the “advise and consent” function of the Senate to impose his appointees through “recess appointments” if they cannot be confirmed. The strategy is shocking in its transparency and audacity, concentrating political power in the person of the president and his leading agents without legal or institutional checks: Crush dissent by weaponizing the awesome power of the federal government to prosecute and harass individual critics, revoke the licenses, contracts, and funding of independent organizations and universities, and purge career officials in the civil service and military who cannot be relied on to implement this plan and obey every one of Trump’s commands, legal or not.
To achieve this, Trump must have at the helm of key institutions—the Department of Justice, the Pentagon, the intelligence community, the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service, the Office of Management and Budget, the Department of Education, and other cabinet departments and regulatory agencies with the ability to deliver punishment—individuals who will serve this plan faithfully and unconditionally.
But these kinds of people—for example, Matt Gaetz (now withdrawn), Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hesgeth, and Kash Patel—often lack the qualifications to be confirmed by an open and deliberate process of confirmation hearings and votes in the Senate, even one his party controls. So, Trump wants the option of imposing his nominees unilaterally. Enter the loophole of “recess appointments,” an option vigorously backed by Trump’s nominee to be Director of OMB, Russell Vought, who has written: “The Right needs to throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last two hundred years.” If the Senate is not “in session” for more than ten days, Trump can name a recess appointment who can serve through the end of the next Congressional session (i.e., the end of the following calendar year). The Senate has managed to frustrate occasional past presidential aspirations in this regard by convening briefly pro forma to avoid going into recess for the necessary minimum of ten days. Trump is demanding that the Senate recess when he orders it to, so that he may vitiate the constitutionally vital “advise and consent” function of the Senate on cabinet and sub-cabinet appointments.
It is not obvious that Trump will have his way with this. Senate Republicans declined to select Trump’s apparent choice for Majority Leader, Florida Senator Rick Scott, who was the most effusive of the three candidates in signaling his readiness to offer servile deference to Trump on appointments and everything else. Instead, they chose a somewhat more independent institutionalist, South Dakota Senator John Thune. And the spectacularly unqualified and ethically challenged nominee for Attorney General, Matt Gaetz, was forced to withdraw from consideration.
But if push comes to shove, even the Senate’s refusal to recess might not be enough to stop the Trump plan. House Speaker Mike Johnson owes his position to Trump and has plainly stated his willingness to do what Trump needs and asks of him. There is now speculation that if the Senate refuses to go into recess, Speaker Johnson could persuade his Republican House colleagues to recess, creating a conflict between the two houses. If, for example, the House votes to recess and the Senate does not, Trump could exploit a never-used provision of the Constitution—Article III, Section 2—which gives the president the power to adjourn Congress if its two houses cannot agree on the matter. This would not only pave the way for Trump to make his recess appointments, it would also move the United States into the terra incognita of authoritarian regimes where the parliament serves only at the pleasure of the king or conqueror.
But there is more. In the American presidential system, two of the most critical functions of the Congress are the power to “advise and consent” on appointments (which rests with the Senate), and to appropriate funds—the power of the purse (which originates in the House). Trump’s team is now resurrecting Richard Nixon’s assertion of virtually unlimited authority to impound (refuse to spend) congressionally appropriated funds for purposes that he doesn’t like. In response to this element of Nixon’s quest for an imperial presidency (which federal courts ruled illegal), Congress passed an explicit statutory limit on the president’s authority to impound funds. In addition to other reforms, the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 forbade the president from withholding the expenditures of appropriated funds unless a specific request for rescission is approved by both houses of Congress.
Trump vowed during the campaign to take dead aim at this legal restraint, claiming impoundment as an inherent presidential prerogative, and not just for efficient management, but to negate the policy choices of Congress through, in effect, a new type of veto power. The Washington Post reported in June that expenditures for green energy, educational programs, and foreign aid would be among the targets. During the campaign, Trump pledged to pressure Congress to repeal the restriction on presidential impoundment. If it does not, he would probably challenge the constitutionality of the 1974 act in court, or he might simply defy it. But the constitutional basis for the act seems clear. The Constitution requires the president to “take Care that the laws be faithfully executed,” and as the legal scholar Zachary S. Price has recently argued, “Appropriations statutes are laws and, as such, fall within this presidential duty of faithful execution. As a general matter, then, Presidents are constitutionally obligated to expend appropriated sums if applicable statutes make that expenditure mandatory.”
If Trump were to somehow establish unlimited power to rescind congressional appropriations and kill entire programs, he would essentially have acquired the “line-item veto.” While such a provision has long been floated as a tool to control runaway federal spending, in the hands of an authoritarian president it could be used not to make government more efficient, but to unilaterally kill programs he doesn’t like and to punish states and causes that oppose him. Add this to the power to circumvent the advice and consent function of the Senate, and Trump would have shifted the balance of power between Congress and the presidency to a degree unprecedented in American history. With absolute loyalists in positions that will be able to threaten and punish businesses, the news media, the universities, civic organizations, as well as individual citizens who might be prosecuted or have their taxes audited, it will be off to the races.
“I Am Your Retribution”
By all accounts, it appears that President Trump is deadly serious about exacting revenge for what he regards as the unfair prosecutions of him over the last four years and his unfair election defeat in 2020 (he has repeatedly used the word “stolen” to describe the election, and he summoned and encouraged the mob that eventually stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021). It is a theme he voiced often during his campaign in diatribes against his political enemies, as when he famously told a rally in Waco, Texas in May of 2023, “I am your warrior, I am your justice. … For those who have been wronged and betrayed … I am your retribution.” NPR reported in October that since 2022, “Trump has issued more than 100 threats to investigate, prosecute, imprison or otherwise punish his perceived opponents.” He has vowed to appoint “a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in [U.S.] history … Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family.” The list of targets he has named explicitly also includes Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, and numerous individuals involved in seeking or supporting prosecution for his alleged crimes. Over the years, he has accused Cheney and Obama, among others, of treason.
And the threats are not only against opposing politicians. In his “coffee table book” released in September, Trump complained that Zuckerberg plotted against him in the 2020 election and warned, “We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison—as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election.” The day before Thanksgiving, Zuckerberg paid a visit to Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate, after which Trump aide Stephen Miller said, “he’s made clear that he wants to support the national renewal of America under President Trump’s leadership.”
Repeatedly over the course of his campaign, Trump borrowed the language of previous authoritarian rulers in vowing to root out “enemies from within.” A defense attorney who represented former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe when he was investigated by Trump’s previous Justice Department recently told The Hill that many of his clients now fear being targeted by the next Trump Administration for their statements and views. “They are concerned that they could be audited by the IRS. They could be the subject of a bogus congressional investigation. There may be even a way to conduct, or at least initiate, a bogus criminal investigation. And all with the goal of, ironically, for the first time actually weaponizing the Department of Justice.” Trump’s new nominee for Attorney General, Pam Bondi, does little to ease these fears. A longtime close associate of Trump’s who was part of the defense team for his first impeachment trial, she is on the record as having warned in 2023 that the next Trump Administration will “clean house.” “The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted—the bad ones—the investigators will be investigated.”
Trump also wants revenge for every military officer who he believes has wronged him or betrayed the country (two sins he regards as one and the same), beginning with the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley. In September of 2023, Trump suggested that Milley deserved to be put to death for his phone call to reassure Chinese officials following the chaos on January 6. Ironically, the threat came just days after Milley warned that he (Milley) would “be on the top of the list” of people Trump would try to jail if he returned to office. Trump’s former Defense Secretary Mark Esper recounted after leaving office that Trump wanted to recall to active duty and then court-martial two of America’s most revered retired officers (Stanley McChrystal and William McRaven). Insiders worry that Trump in office again will make good on these threats (or at least keep hanging them like a sword of Damocles over all senior officers, serving or retired). Milley, one of this country’s most respected recent military commanders, told the journalist Bob Woodward: “He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country. A fascist to the core.”
On November 17, NBC reported that Trump’s transition team is exploring possible court-martial trials of military officers involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan, even possible trials for treason, despite the fact that Trump himself ordered an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan following his 2020 election defeat—a decision that was not implemented because it would have been so catastrophic.
The Great Purge
Since President Harry Truman appointed Herbert Hoover to chair a commission to streamline the federal government, and extending back much further in time, presidents have sought to make government leaner and more efficient. The fact that President-Elect Trump has created a so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” with that goal is not in itself alarming, unprecedented, or even inappropriate. The danger to democracy is in the politicization of the effort, with the goal of subverting a career civil service that has been built up over a century to be nonpartisan, merit-based, and professional. It is certainly plausible to argue, as Francis Fukuyama has done, that there are some policy areas where federal agencies have interpreted their authority overly broadly and entered too much into the realm of policy-making. Experts and scholars without partisan motive also agree on the need for civil service reform, with the goal of creating a more agile, capable, effective, and accountable federal workforce.
But Trump’s reported plan to re-impose a new “Schedule F” for federal civil service appointees (which he had created in October 2020 but was unable to implement in the waning months of his first term) represents something dramatically different and more radical. The goal here, Fukuyama has noted, is expanding presidential power, not making government more efficient and effective. (In fact, research shows that politicizing a government bureaucracy makes it less efficient, less accountable, and more corrupt). Schedule F seeks to undo the very idea of a non-partisan, merit-based civil service, which was constructed with the passage of the Pendleton Act in 1883. It would remove career civil service protections for potentially tens of thousands of federal workers, increasing the number of presidential political appointees from the current 4,000 to as many as 50,000 or more. This would enable the Trump Administration to search for and fire senior and mid-level career officials who are seen as lacking in loyalty or subservience to Trump and his political project—and to replace them with individuals appointed for their political loyalty rather than their expertise.
Behind the move to conquer the civil service, writes Fukuyama, is the even more expansive and illiberal “theory of the ‘unitary executive,’ which sees the U.S. Constitution as giving the president rather than Congress clear authority over the entire executive branch.” But the issue is not only theoretical in its advocacy for an unprecedented assertion of presidential power. It could have more immediate and chilling implications for individual liberties. The plan could, according to Jonathan Swan (reporting in 2022 for Axios), potentially “strip layers” of career non-partisan officials at such sensitive agencies as the Justice Department, the FBI, the IRS, the intelligence agencies, and the Defense Department. For the last few years, Swan reports, pro-Trump groups have been “building extensive databases of people vetted as being committed to Trump and his agenda.”
Moreover, the weaponization of federal government power could extend to virtually every executive department and agency. Politicizing the civil service, Protect Democracy has argued, would make it “easier for an aspiring authoritarian American president to abuse his power to punish, intimidate, and silence opponents by making government aid, contracts, licenses, merger approvals, tax benefits, permits, civil penalties, relief aid, grants, and regulatory waivers contingent on showing personal fidelity.” This is precisely what aspiring autocrats have done in countries like Hungary and Turkey as they have sought to take apart democracy, piece by piece. And this is not to mention the long-term damage to the capacity and effectiveness of U.S. foreign and domestic policy that would follow from a wholesale purge of experienced policy professionals. As Georgetown University public policy professor Donald Moynihan has noted, the pillars of a professional career civil service—merit recruitment, expertise, tenure protection, and political neutrality—have been shown to be associated with greater government effectiveness and less corruption. Knock those away and government risks sliding back to the venality, instability, and inefficiency of the “19th century spoils system.”
A possible companion strategy to politicization by replacement is the imposition of a broader climate of fear throughout every level of government, in which specific workers are harassed and doxed and the sword of Damocles hangs over not just individuals but whole agencies and government departments. The first strategy, The Wall Street Journal has recently reported, is already being pursued by Elon Musk, one of the two co-directors of Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” who—as the world’s richest man, the largest political donor to Trump, and the owner of the social media platform X—was probably already the most powerful individual in the world outside of government. Musk recently reposted on his platform an attack on an obscure official who is director for climate diversification at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. Musk’s repost with the words “So many fake jobs” got 32 million views and, according to the Journal, “sparked a barrage of taunts” and online “jeers” of the individual, an expert in how developing countries can adapt to climate change. Fear and intimidation are characteristic means by which authoritarian governments bring career bureaucracies—what they term “the deep state”—to heel.
A source speculated to Jonathan Swan in 2022 that a second Trump Administration wouldn’t need to fire 50,000 officials because the intimidating effect of some exemplary firings would induce “behavior change” among most career officials. To eliminate whole government agencies and departments would require Congressional approval, and there are a lot of Congressional stakeholders from both parties in cabinet departments like Agriculture and Education and their various programs, not to mention the Pentagon, which has the largest budget and will likely see an increase in the near future.
Stay tuned for Part 2…
Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, both at Stanford University.
Follow Persuasion on X, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.
And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below:
Trump will possibly make himself President for life, like Putin. I foresee a not so distant future where some American citizens are seeking safe asylum in other countries. Unthinkable? Nothing is off the board....................they will be welcomed in Europe, anyway.